The Chem eStandards initiative phase two work began in July 2000, supported especially by BASF, The Dow Chemical Company and DuPont, "to develop a broad set of nonproprietary, Extensible Markup Language (XML) standards to facilitate business-to-business data exchange across the chemical industry worldwide. The initiative's second phase focused on logistics, invoicing, forecasting, exchange and multinational interactions. As a result of efforts during Phases 1 and 2, over 700 data elements have been defined and 47 new transactions can be conducted using the standards. More than 1,000 pages of standards documentation containing technical and implementation information have been created." The 47 transaction types are formally modeled in XML DTDs covering Customers, Catalogs and RFQs, Purchase Orders, Logistics, Financials, Forecasting, and Exchange Interactions.

On February 5-8, 2001, CIDX held meetings in Clearwater, FL to discuss Chem eStandards support and to convene working committees. "This meeting marked the launch of the new CIDX as the chemical industry standards body and support organization for the Chem eStandards." Various working (sub) committees that were established: (1) Architecture Committee; (2) Message Development Committee: Customer/Order/Catalog Subcommittee, Logistics Subcommittee, Finance Subcommittee, Demand Forecasting Subcommittee, Exchange Interaction Subcommitte; (3) Marketing Committee.

"Chem eStandards are the uniform standards of data exchange developed specifically for the buying, selling and delivery of chemicals. They are based on the universally recognized 'gold standard' for electronic data exchange, eXtensible Mark-Up Language (XML). Chem eStandards are open, platform-independent, uniform and available free of charge."